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and rolls downhill toward downtown Brooklyn.
    The Atlantic Center is smashed as the sun passes through empty window frames to alight the bare insides. Father and daughter speed further downtown, and Borough Hall is desecrated. Red spray paint covers the grandiose court buildings like eighties subway cars. The once white columns and roofs are now bronzed and ancient. Blood is splattered on the City Hall steps. Beside the blood is the outline of a body in red spray paint like mock police chalk, the blood spraying from the top of the silhouette’s head.
    A statue of RFK is painted at the lips like a smiling clown. A heavy red stripe runs across his eyes like a blindfold. Nos slows the bike and examines the sullied bust. Below is a stone carved with a quote:
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of those will be written the history of this generation. —RFK
    Red spray paint is scrawled across the quote: CLOWNSTAR. Nos feels a chill.
    Naomi senses her father’s unease. The blood and bodies do not scare him—it’s the chaos in the air. He thinks of his military days—there was always chaos. His job was to impose order in chaos. Find a target among the invisible Hydra-headed terrorists. Take out one head then grab intel—hard drives or cell phones, handwriting on scraps of paper—then track the next head. Take it out. Bad guys find themselves sleeping one moment and cuffed in choppers the next.
Behind a trigger one moment and catching a bullet the next
.
    A gunshot fires from one of the municipal windows above. The laughter rises as other voices join from other courthouse buildings like hyenas calling to a kill.
    They must have been spotted. Nos revs and drives on toward the Brooklyn Bridge.
    Nay clings harder around Nos’ waist, hands trembling. What scares him scares her. He must not be afraid.
    Nos rides the turn of the empty ramp. A yellow flashing light is on the bridge up ahead. As they drive closer they see two white vans blocking the bridge path and nearly a dozen black figures waiting. Nos stops the bike and gazes on at the gang. Nay peers around, and Nos moves his arm so she can see.
    The gang notices and their distant blank faces turn toward them.
    Nos glances north to the Manhattan Bridge. He sees some vehicles that aren’t moving but can’t tell which is the clearer path.
Crossroad
.
    “God, Nay, which way should we go?”
    “Can we go another way?” she asks.
    “We can. There’s always another way.”
    “Then let’s. I don’t want to go this way.”
    “And the other way may be just like this way. It may be worse.”
    Naomi nods. “Can we make it?”
    Nos squints back toward the white vans. No car could pass, but he thinks their bike could squeeze through the shoulder.
    “Yes. I think we can.”
    “You think.”
    “I think so, yes.”
    “Pa,” she says, the tears falling to the yellow edge of her goggles.
    Nos revs the motor, and the crew ahead begins to cheer.
    Nothing to do now but do it. The anxiety before is always worse than the pain after
.
    The clowns laugh, and he drives toward the laughter. Nay clings with everything to his waist as the motor blares. The smiling faces come closer and closer. The faces are white with silly, big, red shit-eating lips. At the last instant, Nos weaves to the side and burns past the van. The clowns are gone behind them.
    Nos looks back, and the clown crew watches and record them. Their faces are painted to scare, to show others like them they are a unit. Faces painted but no masks.
    No gas masks—and they’re still breathing.
No gas masks—could it be? The sickness passed, the air clean?
Nos smiles and glances to Naomi.
Could be she’s OK
.
    No gas masks
.

Chapter 11
Woe to the Vanquished
    Nos and Nay pass fly-ridden bodies along the shoulder. The faces are seared and horrid, some with mouths or eyes missing. Father and daughter look away and see the Manhattan